Dark NighT
New member
Looking nice and shiny! well done polishing it up and getting everything in there!
Mirrored NAS.
- Thread starter AlienALX
- Start date
scubasteve
Member
wow looks great nice job Alien
AlienALX
Active member
Cheers Steve.
I plugged in the Adaptec card earlier and set it as JBOD. Booted into FreeNAS, no drive. After hours of fiddling around I found out that JBOD drives don't appear in the WebUI. So theoretically that card is useless to me.
TBH I am done messing with it now. I am going to throw in a 4tb into the last slot on the board and call it done. 6tb from 1.2 is a big upgrade, more than I think I would ever need.
Have ordered a new front panel to stop it whining every time it boots.
Gawd knows which wire I removed that upset it so much.
I plugged in the Adaptec card earlier and set it as JBOD. Booted into FreeNAS, no drive. After hours of fiddling around I found out that JBOD drives don't appear in the WebUI. So theoretically that card is useless to me.
TBH I am done messing with it now. I am going to throw in a 4tb into the last slot on the board and call it done. 6tb from 1.2 is a big upgrade, more than I think I would ever need.
Have ordered a new front panel to stop it whining every time it boots.
Gawd knows which wire I removed that upset it so much.
Is there an IT mode firmware you can flash to that adaptec card? I had to do that to the Freenas server I have at work. It's a Dell PowerEdge R720 that has a Dell Perc H710m in it and was strictly a raid controller. JBOD wouldn't properly let ZFS see the smart status of the drives. Flashing it to an IT mode firmware though allowed it to work. Now the iDRAC on the board died though so the fans run at 100% speed all the time. Only way to fix it if you've exhausted all the software methods of reflashing the iDRAC is to get a new board so I have a refurb on it's way.
Amazing what you've done to the plastic. I had no idea fixing it up that good was even possible so nice work.
FreeNAS is not playing nice with my Ryzen 1300X. Every 24 hours or so it hard locks. With windows server it's been stable since I put it together. Looking on the FreeNAS forums it looks like people have had issues with the early ryzen chips locking up. Some have fixed it by disabling Cool 'n quiet and/or disabling c-states. I've done both so we'll see now if I have hard lock issues still. I have access to some older Xeon chips so I may end up going that route if I can find a second-hand board for cheap.
Amazing what you've done to the plastic. I had no idea fixing it up that good was even possible so nice work.
FreeNAS is not playing nice with my Ryzen 1300X. Every 24 hours or so it hard locks. With windows server it's been stable since I put it together. Looking on the FreeNAS forums it looks like people have had issues with the early ryzen chips locking up. Some have fixed it by disabling Cool 'n quiet and/or disabling c-states. I've done both so we'll see now if I have hard lock issues still. I have access to some older Xeon chips so I may end up going that route if I can find a second-hand board for cheap.
AlienALX
Active member
Sadly no there's no IT mode for it 
Yeah thankfully plastic is always salvageable unless it's cracked. But whatever this is is really tough. I don't think I have ever seen one cracked.
Both sides had two gouge spots in the same place.
You can't see the scratches in that pic, but if you look above the Apple logo there are two white dots. They were about 2mm deep.
Sanding out plastic really is no different to wet sanding and buffing out clear coat, only it's more fussy because obviously you need to see through it. I'm well versed in this, because I've had several Alienwares that were painted and cleared at the factory, and none were bought new so had scratches when they arrived.
That is the secret weapon. It's made for headlights, which obviously need to be crystal clear. It also has a solvent in, that removes a micro film of surface and cleans the plastic also.
That said I won't lie it was hard work. It took me about four hours of sanding etc. Then again, having painted and wet sanded and buffed out several cars by hand it was pretty easy in comparison.
If I ever run out of space and feel like I have no option but to add more discs I will try this out.
https://www.openmediavault.org/
It's not as pretty, but god you should see the state of my existing Nas's UI. It's about 12 years old and the clunkiest POS ever.
Yeah thankfully plastic is always salvageable unless it's cracked. But whatever this is is really tough. I don't think I have ever seen one cracked.
Both sides had two gouge spots in the same place.
You can't see the scratches in that pic, but if you look above the Apple logo there are two white dots. They were about 2mm deep.
Sanding out plastic really is no different to wet sanding and buffing out clear coat, only it's more fussy because obviously you need to see through it. I'm well versed in this, because I've had several Alienwares that were painted and cleared at the factory, and none were bought new so had scratches when they arrived.
That is the secret weapon. It's made for headlights, which obviously need to be crystal clear. It also has a solvent in, that removes a micro film of surface and cleans the plastic also.
That said I won't lie it was hard work. It took me about four hours of sanding etc. Then again, having painted and wet sanded and buffed out several cars by hand it was pretty easy in comparison.
If I ever run out of space and feel like I have no option but to add more discs I will try this out.
https://www.openmediavault.org/
It's not as pretty, but god you should see the state of my existing Nas's UI. It's about 12 years old and the clunkiest POS ever.
AlienALX
Active member
OK. It is *finally* done. Let me run you through some stuff to make it work for you, so you don't have to run up and down the pigging stairs all pigging last night and it will work first time.
Firstly you must have an LSI card. Or a Dell, which you then flash. I used this tutorial here.
https://techmattr.wordpress.com/201...-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/
Which was confusing, as it doesn't tell you certain info. Firstly, when you install the Dell card you will get a Boot ROM firmware thing as with any RAID card. However, once you flash it using the above you lose that. He doesn't include the IT ROM (note ROM ! not firmware !), which is fine, but if you expect to see it and think you killed the card it can be a red herring. Basically download his stuff. Make a Rufus boot DOS disk. Copy across his stuff, but not what he has left from Rufus. Simply cancel the over write.
Boot into the flash stick you made (Legacy mode only). Then do this.
H200 DOS:
sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -list Write down SAS address.
megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin If this fails move on to next step.
megarec.exe -cleanflash 0 Reboot.
sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.fw Reboot.
sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118it.bin
or sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118p7.bin, reboot, then s2fp19.exe -o -f 2118it.bin
s2fp19.exe -o -sasadd 500xxxxxxxxxxxxx
So in other words ignore the whole guide and simply just do that. Don't worry about bricking the card. I bricked mine twice trying to restore the ROM, but found I didn't need to.
OK. So once that is done when you boot FreeNAS...Nothing will happen. It won't see the card nor any drives attached to it. Once again this is not explained *anywhere* and I only worked it out because of something that happened when I originally tried to install FreeNAS. I put in my Adaptec card in JBOD and FreeNAS crashed on install. So I removed the Adaptec, installed it, then added the Adaptec back but nothing happened. It turns out that whenever you add hardware to FreeNAS you have to reinstall it.
Of course as soon as I made a new FreeNAS boot stick and installed I *immediately* saw "SAS card address 8 ports" etc on install. Once install was completed? yeah, it works alright. I used a test drive I set up as a pool on the SAS card and sure enough it saw it.
So now I have many SATA ports. I am very happy !
Firstly you must have an LSI card. Or a Dell, which you then flash. I used this tutorial here.
https://techmattr.wordpress.com/201...-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/
Which was confusing, as it doesn't tell you certain info. Firstly, when you install the Dell card you will get a Boot ROM firmware thing as with any RAID card. However, once you flash it using the above you lose that. He doesn't include the IT ROM (note ROM ! not firmware !), which is fine, but if you expect to see it and think you killed the card it can be a red herring. Basically download his stuff. Make a Rufus boot DOS disk. Copy across his stuff, but not what he has left from Rufus. Simply cancel the over write.
Boot into the flash stick you made (Legacy mode only). Then do this.
H200 DOS:
sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -list Write down SAS address.
megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin If this fails move on to next step.
megarec.exe -cleanflash 0 Reboot.
sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.fw Reboot.
sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118it.bin
or sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118p7.bin, reboot, then s2fp19.exe -o -f 2118it.bin
s2fp19.exe -o -sasadd 500xxxxxxxxxxxxx
So in other words ignore the whole guide and simply just do that. Don't worry about bricking the card. I bricked mine twice trying to restore the ROM, but found I didn't need to.
OK. So once that is done when you boot FreeNAS...Nothing will happen. It won't see the card nor any drives attached to it. Once again this is not explained *anywhere* and I only worked it out because of something that happened when I originally tried to install FreeNAS. I put in my Adaptec card in JBOD and FreeNAS crashed on install. So I removed the Adaptec, installed it, then added the Adaptec back but nothing happened. It turns out that whenever you add hardware to FreeNAS you have to reinstall it.
Of course as soon as I made a new FreeNAS boot stick and installed I *immediately* saw "SAS card address 8 ports" etc on install. Once install was completed? yeah, it works alright. I used a test drive I set up as a pool on the SAS card and sure enough it saw it.
So now I have many SATA ports. I am very happy !
